Practical Process Automation for Staff:Scheduled Tasks

Presented by: Angela Nimer

What is Process Automation?Alerts

• Placed on Content Pages

• Examples:• Owe dues

• Missing phone number

• New donor club achieved

Scheduled Task

• Perform a routine action

• Examples:• Email new member

• Send a report to staff

• Update database value based on a member activity

NOTE: Process Automation PLUS module must be purchased to create new tasks!

What do I need to know to get started?When?

Who?

What?

• Scheduled vs. Database Change• Frequency: one time, daily, weekly, monthly (hourly can

be made using daily)• Time of day (consider time to run and app pool recycles)

• To, CC, BCC recipients if emailing or sending a report

• Who data should be updated for if stored procedure

• Keep in mind task frequency!

• Email: consider format, images, additional lists of data to appear within the email

• SSRS report to be sent• Stored Procedure to be ran

NOTE: A process automation task can do more than one thing – it can have more than one trigger, action, data source.

Sample Process Automation Task Template

Where do PA Tasks live in iMIS?

Give Your Task a Name• Fill in a name and description for your task so that others will know

what your task does

• Make sure to enable your task once you have done your tests and are ready for it to run

When? – Triggers Tab• Add trigger to fill in when and how often the task should run

When? – On a schedule• Fill in frequency, schedule

days & times, and date the task should start

• End date can be left blank if indefinite

• Hourly tasks can be done by adding multiple daily triggers, one for each hour of the day

• Keep in mind time zone

• Make sure to enable your trigger once you have competed your testing and are ready for the task to run

When? – On a database change• Select the table to watch for

a value change

• Indicate if the trigger should happen upon insert of a new row into the table, update of a specific column in the table, or deletion of a row in the table

• Make sure to enable your trigger once you have competed your testing and are ready for the task to run

WARNING: Triggers on a database change can impact performance!

Who? – Data sources Tab• Add data source to determine who the action should be performed on

Who? – Select Your IQA• Select Your IQA

• Give your data source a name

• Data source names should NOT contain spaces

Process Automation IQA Tips• Make sure your filter takes into consideration the task frequency

or recipients will receive emails more than you might like!

• Use a date with within days = 1 AND less than today’s date to filter by “Yesterday”. The “AND” filter is important!

Process Automation IQA Tips - continued• You cannot use SQL

functions in the filter area of IQA’s so create a Business Object and use the Filter Expression there instead!

Process Automation IQA Tips - continued• If your trigger is on a database change, be sure to include a filter in

your IQA filtering by @TriggerID

• The column to filter by must match the column noted in the task trigger screen

When? – Conditions Tab• Add conditional data source if you don’t want the actions to run if your

conditional data source returns no results

• Conditional data sources are optional

What? – Actions Tab• Add the action you want the task to perform

What? – Send a communication• Select the task data source the email should use

• The data source selected here overrides the recipient data source selected in the communication template itself

• Select the communication template to use

What? – Run a report• Select the SSRS .RDL report to send

• Enter from, to, and subject information for the report email to be sent’

• If you want to be able to specify a body message or have a custom report per recipient, then use send communication instead with report attachment

NOTE: Run a report actions do not require a data source to be added to the task.

What? – Run a stored procedure• Enter Stored Procedure to be ran

• Enable parameters if parameters are to be sent to the stored procedure

Communication Template Tips• It is recommended to only have the TO go to one recipient at a time (not a list) as iMIS records the

interaction based on the iMIS ID (CC and BCC interaction records do not get written)

• CC and BCC have some known bugs when using data placeholders instead of static values (you can repeat rows in your recipient data source for CC/BCC to get around this issue)

• The party additional data source automatically gets created with communication templates and ties to your recipient data source via the iMIS ID and pulls recipient Name table data

• Your recipient data source MUST contain an iMIS ID

Communication Template Tips - continued• Data Placeholders can use format attributes to help format things like dates and currency

(see resources at end of slides for options) – ie {#recipient.VolunteerDate format=“d”}

• {foreach} loops can be used to display repeating data from your Additional data sources

• It is recommended to use lists or line breaks only inside of the {foreach} as there are some bugs with using a table inside of the {foreach}

Communication Template Tips - continued• If using images in your email with width and height attributes, Outlook tends to ignore

those attributes so try to make the image itself the size you wish it to appear

• Use the preview button to review your emails to make sure recipients and data placeholders fill in as expected.

• If extra spaces appear or things are not formatting as you desire, you can look at the HMTL view to make sure HTML tag appear correctly with correct beginning and ending tags where you want them

Testing Your Email Tasks• If sending emails, have the task go to your email address for testing

and so you can verify the email is formatted the way you would like

Testing Your Email Tasks - continued• To avoid filling up your inbox with lots of email when testing, set your

IQA filter to limit the number of results returned

Testing Your Email Tasks - continued• You can go to the

member profile history tab and view Recent Interactions to verify email sent and recorded for the recipient

• You can also Resend and Download the email as well

Logs – Making sure things are running!• Make sure both the Trigger “Enabled” checkbox and the task “Enabled”

checkbox are checked

• Check the task Logs Tab to verify things are running properly

Logs – Making sure things are running! - continued• For email tasks, check the communication logs to verify emails are

being sent and delivered

• Click on the email subject to see the list of recipients and email addresses sent to along with specific delivery issue details

Resources• iMIS Process Automation Documentation:

https://help.imis.com/iMIS2017/Features/RiSE/Process_Automation/Process_automation.htm

• iMIS Communication Template Documentation: https://help.imis.com/iMIS2017/Features/Marketing/Communications/Working_with_communication_templates.htm?Highlight=communication%20templates

• Communication Template Placeholder Format Options: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/base-types/formatting-types

• SQL Server Built-in Functions: https://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_ref_sqlserver.asp

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